‘Real-time’ charts provide insight on emerging hits.

Following last year’s decision to count YouTube streams towards chart rankings, Billboard has launched two new singles charts ranking the most popular songs on Twitter.

In a move that could further alter the industry’s definition of a hit, the new charts are supposed to “redefine how fans interact with, and influence, popular content by ranking the most popular songs being shared”, according to Billboard. The primary ‘Trending 140’ chart tracks the ‘acceleration’ of song mentions on Twitter in the US measured by the hour, day or week, while the additional Emerging Artists chart focuses on newer acts whose music has been shared over the past 24 hours.

At the time of writing, the Trending 140 chart over the past hour is led by Lana Del Rey’s ‘Ultraviolence’, followed by La Roux’s ‘Uptight Downtown’ – which had apparently dropped a whopping 150% since the last measurement – and Pharrell’s ‘Here’. The 24-hour chart offers a marginally less fickle overview, with Austin Mahone’s ‘Shadow’ at number one. Meanwhile, the Emerging Artists chart is currently led by Ransom, Rochelle Jordan and K CAMP.

In order to come up with the ‘real-time’ rankings, Billboard and Twitter monitor tweets for links to Spotify and iTunes, hashtags such as #nowplaying and #np, and words like ‘listen’ and ‘song’.

Whether the charts will prove to be a useful barometer of popularity or simply be a target for hordes of rabid 1D fans remains to be seen.